Application Insights is a telemetry and instrumentation offering that gives you a great out-of-box experience for understanding what is happening with your sites, apps, and mobile apps. The data viewing experience in the new Azure portal extends from high level summary charts of your usage all the way down to viewing individual diagnostic events. The…

With the RC release of LightSwitch 2012, some users have noticed data load (the "red x") problems when using Chrome (and very old versions of Firefox). The underlying issue is how Chrome asks for data and how the OData libraries that LightSwitch uses respond to those requests. Chrome appends the "Accept-Charset" HTTP header onto outgoing…

The typical coding experience in a Lightswitch app revolves around the objects you’ve created — your tables, your screens, queries, and so on. When you click “Write Code” in our design experience, there is a rich and strongly typed programming experience for you to use. Your intellisense picker understands that a “Customer” exists and has…

Fiddler is an indispensible tool for troubleshooting client/server communications, especially when your next best option is running the client under a debugger, or trying to glean info from IIS logs. The WCF Binary Inspector for fiddler is a great help when you are working with WCF servies using the SOAP messages that have been binary encoded/compressed according…

There’s not a lot of easy-to-come-by-knowledge on how ASLR works or what it does, so to save people some effort, I’ll place some links here: http://www.nynaeve.net/?p=100 http://www.blackhat.com/presentations/bh-dc-07/Whitehouse/Paper/bh-dc-07-Whitehouse-WP.pdf The first link talks about how to turn on ASLR for your dlls. The second is an in depth discussion of the Vista RTM ASLR implementation and some…

I’ve recently become involved in testing the Document Management features in Axapta. This is a pretty powerful subsystem for integrating external structured and unstructured data and document types with the in built ERP system. There are two sides of document management… the end-user aspect and the administrator or setup side of it. Ultimately what you…

So I listen to music at work a bunch via headphones (here in Fargo, we’ve got cubes, not individual offices). I use my laptop as my “fluff” machine – that is, i listen to music, read mail, do office stuff, write up bugs, web surf (gasp!), etc from it. Naturally, this doesn’t have the “media” keys…

A coworker here was thinking about getting an iPod Nano. My best friend ordered one the day they were announced and I got to see it a bit this weekend. Side note – we were at a resturant and I was playing with it, and the waitress came over to talk to us about it…

Suppose that I’ve got an instance of SQL server setup for testing, and I’ve programmatically created databases on this instance, but never cleaned them up. This can leave you with hundreds of databases that you’ll never use again, and there’s no reason for them to continue taking up space and cluttering things which you do…

Suppose I have a notion of a User Account in my application, and I want to allow 3rd parties to tie that user account to one or more objects in an external directory/authentication system. Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that I’m going to use System.DirectoryServices.DirectoryEntry to represent links to external directory objects. I…